“That’s why I made all this effort to find you. I’ve been hearing rumors, from someone who works at the Palace and heard her talking to Dash after you got away. They say that you can show people the things you’ve seen, and that’s why the vice regent is scared of you. You know all her secrets, you know the whole truth about her, and anyone who touches you can experience it, as if they had been there in person.”
I hesitate, fingering the sides of my cloak.
“Please, show me,” he says again.
I open my cloak. When I bring the tendrils closer to his face, he lets out a slow breath, like steam escaping the coffee urn. I show him Bianca speaking to the Progressive Students, then try to take him through the glimmering parties in Argelo, Bianca flirting with these oligarchs, and the fleet of armored vehicles. Forcing myself to revisit these things feels like a whole new kind of memory-panic, except with crushing sadness instead of anxiety.
Jeremy untangles his face from my tendrils, and I realize after a moment that he’s shaking with happiness.
“This … this is amazing. You could be the single most effective recruitment tool in the history of political organizing. People will want to try this for themselves, and once they do, they’ll be on our side forever. I can see why the vice regent is scared out of her mind.”
I step away from him, all my senses heightened as if danger could arrive from anywhere. This storage room feels both too claustrophobic and too exposed.
“I didn’t come back home to be some living piece of propaganda,” I say.
“She’s trying to destroy you,” Jeremy says. “You have to destroy her first. That’s how it works.”
“Thanks for the food.” I move away from him, climbing the half stairway toward the blinding glare coming through the doorframe. “And for tending my shoulder. I feel much better. Please take good care of Cyrus.”
Hearing his name, Cyrus growls and stretches his pseudopods.
“Please stay here. I have an extra bedroll. We can talk more later. You don’t have to rush into anything. But this is a way for both of us to get our lives back. Now that I’ve experienced your power, I…” Jeremy rushes behind me, hands raised, but makes no move to stop me. “You can control the thing that most of us are controlled by. We could do so much together.”
I pause at the door. “If you want to become like me,” I say, “climb the Old Mother and just wait at the top. Go alone, no weapons. They’ll come and find you.” Then I walk outside, shielding my face against the sunbaked heat, and hurry back to my hiding place before the shutters open.
* * *
My shoulder still burns, and I don’t know whether to curse myself or Bianca against the pain. I needed to run away from Jeremy, because I was afraid I would end up agreeing to let myself be used again. Maybe I’d have tried to share the story of Bianca in a way that made people want to forgive her, even as they rise up against her. And that might be the only way I’ll ever get to share my abilities with anyone, without them reacting the way the Glacier Fools did, or Bianca. People can stand things for the sake of politics that they would never endure for love or profit. But even if I could do that to Bianca without loathing myself, I know I couldn’t stand to deliver that story to people, over and over. I would turn to ice if I even tried.
The shutters open, and close again, and open again, while I hold myself still and keep my back to the brazier of the Young Father. My shoulder still hurts when I move, but I think it’s getting better.
I sleep inside my crawlspace without any regard to the state of the shutters, and maybe I’ve just been away too long to sink back into the old rhythm. If anything, now I prefer going out when everyone else sleeps. I don’t fear the Curfew Patrols, not with all my new senses, and Xiosphant looks lovelier when you can see every stone and adornment without people in the way, the interplay of ancient technology and the more recent handcrafted imitations. I can’t believe how much odd little things delight me, like a fluttering wrapper from the cakes we used to get at grammar school, or a sign for the Grand Cinema, the tiny space where they screen old hard-light dramas. Sometimes I catch the acrid scent of tannery smoke, or notice the shimmer of the air in the Cold Front, and I can’t help feeling this tawdry nostalgia.
But actual people are more complicated. After so much exposure to Argelan culture, I can’t look at random strangers here in Xiosphant without trying to guess which compartment their families traveled in, and how that lines up with their social class here.
A Curfew Patrol marches away from me, nowhere nearby, but I hear another set of footsteps that sound more furtive, stopping and starting as if someone keeps hiding. I creep over the lintels and around the smokestacks of bleached-brick buildings, getting closer to the temperate zone, until I lower myself into the street in front of Alyssa.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” she says in Argelan. “We’d better get off the street. I know a place we can lie low.” I follow her down more alleys until I realize we’re circling closer to the Palace and I’m sure that I’ve trusted the wrong person again. But at the edge of the fanciest street market, Alyssa opens a trapdoor and helps me into a small space under one of the market stalls. This is the closest to the night I’ve been in a while, and my bracelet gives a faint buzz.
Alyssa shines a small torch around the tiny wooden space. “We waited out the curfew in here on my first visit to Xiosphant. Mouth was bleeding all over the place. Look, you can still see the stains.”
Her curly brown hair is longer, and she has a couple of new scars on the left side of her face, right next to her wide, protruding ear. She winces when she moves, and even her smile has thicker lines, but her laugh still sounds the same as ever. I hug her and she leans on my shoulder for a moment.
“Mouth sent me to find you. I’m not letting her out of bed until her lung sounds like a lung again. But she’s been climbing out of her skin with worry. She made me promise to keep looking for you.”
“I can’t believe Mouth is alive. I saw her take at least two bullets at the Palace.”
“Must be tough to be a masochist when your entire body is scar tissue, without a single nerve ending left.” Alyssa seems to laugh, but then she stares at me with her mouth pursed. “She was willing to die for you. She didn’t even hesitate.”
“You should have seen her face when she heard that you were alive, and then when she found out you were in a dungeon. I’ve never seen joy go dark so fast.”
“Huh.” She raises her eyes for a moment, thinking about Mouth, then looks back at me. “I suppose you’re going to just show me what her face looked like. That’s your new thing, right?”
I wince, thinking about Jeremy. All his big plans for me.
“I’m not anybody’s recording device,” I say.
“Good. The only thing that makes life tolerable is that people forget all the stupid things I say as soon as I’ve finished saying them.”
We sit in the tiny hutch under the market square for a while, and I can tell this place brings back conflicted old memories for Alyssa. She mentioned Mouth’s blood, long since dried.
I think something and say it at the same time: “You’ve always been the strongest, out of all of us.”
Alyssa half laughs, half just shakes her head. “Doesn’t feel like it, most of the time. But then I think about my ancestors, and everything they went through for me to be here, and I just find a way. That’s what this town tried to keep you from having, I guess, because they wanted you to be weak. And now look at you.”
The scent of old blood has been thickening since we closed the lid, along with a musty loam funk. Something about this earthiness reminds me of the Resourceful Couriers’ sleep nook.
“Mouth searched for ages for something to believe in, and I couldn’t give it to her,” Alyssa says. “Even this Barney guy, who used to be one of the Citizens, couldn’t. But you did. And now she wants me to join your cult, or your security detail, whichever. But … I can’t be disappointed again. I just can’t. The next disappointment is going to snap me in half.”
I want to say that I don’t need Mouth’s protection, or Alyssa’s either. But Mouth just took two bullets for me. So I say, “What will you do, if Mouth wants to stay with me, and you decide not to?”
“Don’t know. I can’t go home. I guess I could turn mercenary, see if the new Uprising wants a fighter. But I think I need a break from overthrowing governments for a while. I could work at a dive bar. The Low Road, maybe.” She makes a peevish noise with her mouth. “I really thought Bianca was going to be great. She had me convinced. How do I know it’s going to be any different if I decide to follow you?”
I watch her face close enough to see a flicker of hope, in among all the twinges. I don’t want anybody to follow me, or to believe in me. I want to sleep for another five or six turns of the shutters.
But I was sent back here to teach. So I feel the calm settle into me.
“There won’t be any safe place soon,” I say. “Good weather’s gone forever. Imagine if the next cyclone hits one of the farmwheels.”